Normally, I would not be
sitting here writing a story on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. But
Belinda is sorting through everything we own to determine what can be
given away, and it’s raining, so we aren’t going out today. I was
standing in front of my batterie de cuisine, fixing lunch, and
watching CNN do features on food. I could make something up that
funny, but there it was in front of me – people expecting to be taken
seriously – talking about things that are of interest to almost no one
and about things that are so absurd and meaningless that I can only
wonder at what kind of idiot, other than me, is watching it.
The first useless story
is told by the CNN person and the editor of a national food magazine.
What, the CNN person asks, are the trends today in food? The well
traveled, urbane sophisticate editor of the food magazine responds
roughly as follows.
Today the most expensive
restaurants in the United States are sushi restaurants in New York
City and in Los Angeles, where dinner for two is $ 500. Kiss my ass!
If you really eat well and drink some rather great wine, dinner for
two can be $ 500 at Morton’s Steakhouse. But sushi for two at $ 500 is
simply stupid/funny/inept. Then I figured it out. Dinner for two is
about $ 85. The other $ 415 is for the bullshit. Nobu Masuhisa may
charge $ 500 to eat his raw fish (which is wonderful), but Nobu
Masuhisa aint fixing it. Some low level line cooks/”sushi preppers”
are fixing it at a restaurant that bears his name. Nobu only cooks
occasionally on television. Truth to tell, he once cooked regularly,
but, having made his bones and having a flair for great bullshit, he
doesn’t have to slice fish anymore. He does the marketing and raises
the money from the suckers and appears on television. Dinner for two
at Kanayama, the best sushi restaurant in Houston, including beer, may
be $ 85, and it’s wonderful. The sushi at Nobu isn’t any better than
the sushi at Kanayama. But the bullshit is different, and the suckers
really dig the bullshit. And believe me, I know great bullshit when I
see it. For example, amongst the sushi aficionados, the bullshit is
that the sushi chef/sushi prepper is some highly trained expert on the
subject of fresh fish, who can spot a nematode from a mile away, and
whose ethical standards are such that he would commit seppuku rather
than hand you a piece of fish from yesterday’s inventory. Now that’s
the start of great bullshit there. In fact, Japanese bullshit is one
of the most convincingly theatrical schools of bullshit in the entire
world. A Japanese person or group of people, dressed in their Full
Cleveland outfits, can stage a fart ritual ceremony that will convince
you that the art of the fart is at least the cultural equivalent of
origami. Of course, in reality, there is no such thing as a fart
ritual ceremony.
According to the rules of
Japanese bullshit, fish vetting is at least the equivalent of a Frog’s
wine snobbery. In the Frog modality, one inspects wine bottle corks
like a pediatrician inventorying the parts of a newborn child for
birth defects. The size and shape of a glass vary according to wine
variety and the social status of the Frog who is about to drink it. A
fourth generation Frog would never hold a wine glass by its bowl, but
touches only the very bottom round base of it to avoid the taint of
any fingerprint spoliating the sublime vision of the vessel and its
sacred contents. With deft and subtle gesticulation, a Frog can use
that grip to swirl the wine in the glass to enhance the aroma/”nose”
of the wine to suffuse the ambient air so that he can experience the
epiphany of the first sniff. Its robe/color and depth of chromatic
richness are the eye candy that makes a Frog tumesce in anticipation.
Ultimately that first soupcon of a taste informs his palatal
recollection of vintages of yesteryear and the place of this vendage
in the pantheon of oenological history. If he is really good at Frog
bullshit, he will tell you from which section of the vineyard the
grapes came that bore the wine in this particular glass, and at what
time of the day/day of the week they were picked, and whether the
picker was left handed or right.
The local joke is that if
the glass were full of piss, he could tell you after only one sip
whose piss it is, what, if anything is wrong with that person’s
urinary tract and how long ago that person had had an orgasm.
None of the “great” chefs
of America cook in restaurants any more. Line cooks and sous chefs do
their cooking according – more or less – to recipes that they
developed. Chefs are replaced by kitchen managers who do paperwork
(now done digitally on a computer without paper). Bean counters are
the geniuses of restaurants today, teamed with marketing/sales/advert
people who sell the bullshit to the expense account crowd. Great chefs
only cook on television, you fool. Much of what passes for cooking at
the great chefs’ restaurants today is terrible – overcooked or
underdone, with spit or boogers in it depending on the mood swings of
the waiters. Is that really guacamole, or does someone in the kitchen
have a very productive cough? Never eat in a restaurant where you can
hear people in the kitchen sneezing.
The second trend is
toward mini vegetables. We are moving away from baby vegetables to the
slightly larger mini vegetables. I bet you didn’t realize that was
happening, did you? Only small town rubes eat baby veggies anymore.
The cognoscenti eat mini veggies. So if you go out and order baby
veggies, be prepared to be hooted out of the restaurant.
The third trend is for
ordinary things to be made in a more upscale mode. In certain cities,
you can get upscale pizzas and upscale hamburgers and upscale hotdogs
that are made with upscale ingredients by upscale culinarians for
upscale people willing to pay upscale prices. I suppose eventually
someone will be deep frying chicken in truffle oil.
The fourth trend is the
exciting development of mixologists as celebrities, who are now
starring at upscale eateries with upscale bars, where the upscale bar
scene is as important as the upscale food. And, of course, once again,
the difference is in part the improved quality of ingredients, or at
least the perceived improved quality of the ingredients, the ability
of the mixologist (formerly known as the bartender) to promote
him/herself as a celebrity mixologist doing guest appearances at the
very best upscale lounges and restaurants in town (but not yet so
upscale as to disdain tips – one would think that the tip would
automatically be added to the total tab to eliminate the indignity of
the tipping ritual amongst the truly upscale). I’m so old that I can
remember when a martini at the Oak Bar in The Plaza was only $ 10. I
can also remember that I thought that was extreme. Now, thirty five
years later, martinis at Muldoons are $ 10.
With that, the food and
wine “expert” returned to the Napa Valley to study wine and food
pairings with someone renowned for their ability to tell bumpkins what
wine to drink with their food. [Cross reference VENI, VIDI, VINO
elsewhere in this compendium]
The next bozo dredged up
by CNN this day is some California nitwit with a PhD from the
University of California at Davis and an uncanny ability to squeeze
grant money out of politically correct foundations to “do” studies
about “issues” relating to OBESITY.
According to this person
who, were you to shoot her in the head would experience absolutely no
tissue damage, Americans are being victimized by restaurateurs who
sell food that Americans like to eat. Lest you, with your limited
intellect and shallow perception, immediately jump to the conclusion
that such is the way of free market capitalism, Dr. Dipshit is quick
to point out that selling food to people who like to eat is inherently
exploitative and should be against both law and public policy. To be
sure, these emporia of yummy, greasy comestibles daily take unfair
advantage of hungry people who are able to pay for food by selling
them the food that they wish to eat. The bloody shame of it all! No
civilized, caring society (presumably found in California) should
tolerate such a thing without at least requiring that the
establishment conspicuously publish for the delectation of all and
sundry a dissertation on the nutritional characteristics of each
cheeseburger and biggy fries. As logic goes in California, folks would
carefully study the nutrition tutorials and thereafter make
intelligent food choices rather than simply eat whatever tastes good.
If there are twenty to thirty items on the menu, there could be
wallpaper everywhere imprinted with a nutritional guide to every bite,
informing you of its tendency to clog arteries, cause weight gain
amongst those who do not exercise, generate adipose tissue and
cellulite, increase risks of heart disease and diabetes mellitus, and
generally to foreshorten life and impair the optimum functioning of
brains and penises.
Dr. Dipshit was then
asked the ultimate tough question of the interview. To what extent are
the undereducated, the economically deprived and ethnic minorities
exploited by these demons of gastronomic greed more than anglo saxon
college graduates from wealthy suburban families? The good doctor
nonsensically responded that these are among the many issues that may
have an impact on the problem, and the extent of it all is not yet
fully understood, but in need of extensive/expensive additional public
health research. If the good doctor had said that stupid and ignorant
people of little means have fewer choices and a lessened ability to
make the most advantageous nutrition decisions, that correct answer
would have suggested that the obvious truth is already known and that
no more research money should be spent/wasted on the subject. Suffice
it to say, however, that those who sell food that people eat unwisely
should, in the “logic” of California, have to bear the public health
costs of “our” obesity epidemic. People who eat what they like and get
fat are really the victims of exploitation, not just the fucking
imbeciles that everyone tends to think they are. Congress immediately
started the process to enact a statute prohibiting lawsuits by fat
slobs against the restaurants that they patronize every day in which
they claim that their obesity is the fault of the restaurant. Such
lawsuits are already being brought, and, at least in New York, the
courts are not intelligent enough to dismiss them summarily as
unreasonable and vexatious litigation without merit. A trial court
judge in New York did throw out such a lawsuit against McDonalds, but
the New York Court of Appeals reinstated the lawsuit and sent it back
for further consideration. The court should have disbarred the lawyer
who brought the lawsuit and banished the plaintiff to boot camp for a
year.
A dear friend who is an
OB/GYN and who does a lot of surgery has explained to me some of the
nightmare situations that really obese people encounter when they
require surgical intervention. In abdominal surgery, the layers of fat
need to be pulled back so that the surgeon can reach the organs that
require attention. Holding this fat layer back while surgery is going
on cannot be allowed to be done by hands that are needed to assist
with the surgery. The fat is “fish hooked” and pulled back. The
“hooks” are attached to straps that clamp on to the rail/side of the
operating table. The scene looks not unlike flensing a whale that has
just been caught and is being butchered on board the whaling vessel.
When obese women require a surgical procedure that must be done
through the vagina, the fat thighs intruding to cover the access area
do not pull apart sufficiently simply by leg spreading. The hanging
fat thighs have to be similarly pulled apart and held apart by similar
strapping mechanisms so that adequate access to the vagina may be had.
The distance from the vaginal entrance to the cervix can also be
significantly greater because of the fatty tissue of the labia majora
and an overhanging mons veneris chock a block with fat, necessitating
on occasion inserting the forearm almost up to the elbow. Incisions
frequently cannot heal because the overlay of fat tissue prevents
access to fresh air and healing simply does not incur. The resulting
infection can last for months and require additional surgery to clear
away necrotic tissue. We should consider making high definition DVDs
of surgical procedures on these folks, so that they can watch what
happens to them when they need an operation. The ghastly scene would
hopefully have a better effect upon them than the grisly venereal
disease films that the troops had to watch years ago in an attempt to
scare them away from having casual sex with local girls. Suffice it to
say that any man of normal proportions ought to think twice before
assuming that he could ever have an effective sexual encounter with a
really large, obese woman. It just won’t reach far enough. Of course,
he could simply insert his head and wiggle his ears for effect.
The program then segued
into the question of organic food, food supposedly grown/processed
without the use of chemicals/with only limited use of chemicals. Of
course, compost and composting are chemical substances and chemical
processes, but that’s another and beside the point issue. Organic
farming involves only the chemistry of nature, the natural
decomposition/rotting of natural substances that result in an ultimate
fertilizer in the nature of that which God intended.
I have no quarrel with
the organic food folks. I go to Whole Foods and buy organic food from
time to time, when some stupid clerk there isn’t pissing me off with a
dose of slacker attitude.
What we think of as
organic food sometimes is organic food and sometimes is almost organic
food and sometimes not very organic food.
What is organic food for
purposes of labeling what we buy thinking that we are buying organic
food is an exercise in political lobbying. As more and more upscale
yuppie types get on the organic food bandwagon, the incremental demand
for the more expensive organic products represents an opportunity not
to be missed. It is the opportunity to exploit the “organic”
designation by putting it on products that are not organic or that are
quasi organic.
There are two lobbies at
war on this issue. The organic fundamentalists want food products
labeled organic only if they were produced from plants that were
fertilized by real animal shit or are animals that were fed a minimum
of non-organic feed and no hormones. Hormones, in case you didn’t
know, are introduced into the animal’s nutritional mass to enhance
rapid growth. Estrogen capsules are stapled to chicken necks or placed
in their food to reduce their growth cycle time and get them to market
in less time and with less expense. Estrogen is what makes chickens
have large, juicy, meaty breast meat, rather than the scrawny little
boogers that third world people eat when and if they can catch/steal
one.
Of course, it
didn’t take long for food manufacturers to realize that the more
products they can label as organic, the more money from that yuppie
demand pool would flow into their treasuries. And so a second lobbyist
group was formed to get the FDA to permit food to be labeled organic
even if it does not comply with the fundamentalists’ view of what
organic food should be. And since food manufacturers have more money
to spread around in Washington than organic fundamentalists, the
organic standards are changing in the sense that there is dilution.
The organic promise of a near chemical free diet is no longer a
reliable promise.
This is not a new
phenomenon, as milk producers have for years, through similar
spreading around of money in Washington, obtained changes in the so
called milk standard to permit the whole milk to be cut with water to
increase the volume of liquid that can be labeled as milk. As time
goes by, milk becomes more water added than what simply came out of
some damn cow. So it is now becoming with organic food.
Wine labeling has some of
the same approach. Only a stated percentage of the contents of a
bottle of wine produced in California need be wine that the label says
it is. Artificial means to obtain certain wine tastes that might in
the old days have been imparted by aging in oak barrels (like putting
oak chips into wine resting in metal aging tanks) have been going on
for years. Nowadays, the processing of “fine” wine is such that you
need wait less time for it to “age”. The gradual chemical changes in
tannins that smooth out red wines that are of varieties that improve
with aging have now been speeded up to “make them more approachable at
an earlier moment”. The California wine joke is that wine producing
establishments/wineries are now laughingly referred to as winery
refineries. Truth to tell, there is really no longer any reason to buy
red wine for more than maybe $ 30 a bottle. At $ 65 a bottle you
aren’t really getting better wine taste, and a great deal of really
delicious wine (by comparison) can now be had for less than $ 15 a
bottle. As people become better educated about wine, fewer will be
buying the expensive stuff that is now passed off on rubes who delight
in label snobbery. We are less and less a deferred gratification
population. We want it now, dammit!
The wine ponce population
is dwindling. More folks just want a good tasting wine. As more folks
drink wine, the percentage of the wine drinking population with
sufficient wealth to buy the expensive stuff is less and less of the
whole market. More reasonably priced wine that can be enjoyed right
now is the direction of the wine business. Of course, dummied down
wine is still sold with expensive labels to the bozos who attend wine
pairing seminars. The stupid/ignorant will always be amongst us, and
we will always have shit to sell to them with a label that says “this
aint shit”. HAHAHAHAHA!
There is still lousy
wine, good wine and better wine. But paying big prices for wine no
longer gets you value commensurate with the price. That doesn’t mean
that you can’t find something worth paying $ 75 a bottle for. Treat
yourself to a Ken Wright Pinot Noir from Oregon and you’ll see what I
mean. But nothing coming out of Italy is worth $ 75 a bottle, although
much of it costs that and more. You may have a year or two before the
joint venture wines of Mondavi and Frescobaldi are priced way beyond
value. Lucente is good and fairly priced, but Luce is not. Villa Banfi
is only for the suckers. Brunello di Montalcino may be the best
Italian joke of the decade. Ten years ago only the locals drank
Sicilian wines, like Taurasi and Regaleali. Then Tony Soprano and Big
Pussy Bonpensiero were drinking Regaleali on his television show, and
it is now in stock everywhere for $ 65 a bottle. Kiss my ass! At $ 25
a bottle it’s great wine. At $ 65 a bottle it’s just ripping the
tourists. It was entertaining to read lately that the actor who plays
Big Pussy can’t get out of character and was recently sentenced to
attend anger management classes for punching out his old lady. Frog
wine has always been overpriced and often fraudulent. Some of it is
delicious, but rarely worth the price. Spanish wine is very good, but
Jorge Ordonez, the Robert Mondavi of Spain, is pumping up the price
with great marketing bullshit. To be sure, he has improved the quality
of the product, but the better Spanish wines are now rarely worth the
price. Delicious Spanish wines can still be had reasonably but you
have to know where to look. The Torres Gran Sangre de Toro is still a
bargain, and the 2000 Emilio Moro Ribera del Duero is one its way
through the roof in price, but still worth it under $ 25.
Isn’t it interesting how
a stupid program on CNN can open a train of thought, and by the time
you’re through typing, it’s eight pages long and you have pulled the
cork on another bottle of yummie vino. A Salute, Y’all!
